Sondheim based his musical version [of Sweeney Todd] on a recent London stage play, and it is a positive feast (!) for English majors. There are traces of Jonathan Swift (his icily ironic Modest Proposal), of the Beggar's Opera (the Brecht version, not the life-celebrating John Gay original), of Charles Dickens' pestilential nineteenth-century London, of [William] Hogarth's prints, France's Grand Guignol theater of horror, and even I Remember Mama (the culinary secret of her meatballs)…. The relentless misanthropy ("The history of the world … is who gets eaten and who gets to eat"), the lewdness, the venality, and the scatological language of the play are relieved only by the blackest of comedy….

Wild horses couldn't drag me to see this depressing spectacle again, and I mightily resisted listening to the original-cast album….

But what is the message? Why, simply what Utopian pastoralists from William ("dark Satanic mills") Blake to the...